Faster Flowing Security

Increasingly, getting into concerts, sporting events and airports can be accomplished using fingerprints, hand and face shapes and more, dramatically speeding up the flow of people and reducing the stress of waiting.

Rapid Identity Detection

Introduction

When it comes to security, methods that allow rapid authentication are gaining in popularity. No matter where we are, we’re able to access our phones using our faces or fingerprints in less time (and more securely) than it takes to enter a passcode.

Technical Experts

Guangjie HanIEEE Senior Member

Steven FurnellSenior IEEE Member

Multi-factor Authentication

Biometric identification is a quick and reasonably secure authentication method. However, even with advances in biometrics, relying on it alone can create vulnerabilities. Multi-factor authentication is still needed.

In the process of identity authentication, it is not possible to rely entirely on biometric technology. Additional information such as temperature, humidity or a combination of multiple biometric technologies such as heartbeat should be added to improve the quality of identification.

Sharing ID Data

People are increasingly concerned about biometric data getting exposed as part of a data breach. It’s important for users to be able to trust systems, especially when it comes to continued security adoption and moving beyond simple passwords.

The best approaches rely upon the biometric data itself not being shared. This is, for example, the approach that Apple has gone to great lengths to emphasise with its biometric implementations - the user’s data does not leave the device and is stored within a secure enclave within the processor, meaning that local apps don’t get to see it either.

Steven FurnellSenior IEEE Member, Professor of Information Security at the University of Plymouth (U.K.)